Jack’s Record Cellar and Roy Loney

You’ve probably heard of the Haight Ashbury. Well, the Haight Ashbury over time became simply the Haight. Then it was the Upper Haight. At which point Haight & Fillmore turned into the Lower Haight. It’s not all that confusing as it sounds. Anyway, the Lower Haight is where you’ll find Jack’s Record Cellar, open on a schedule it takes a minute to wrap your head around. (“Open to the public on Saturdays, on other days by reservation only.”) Someone once said that the first thing you’ll notice in Jack’s is that record-store smell. The kind of smell that lets you know you just might find something mind-blowing here.

Behind the counter at Jack’s, if you’re lucky, you might find Roy Loney. Yes, the Roy Loney. I was there recently and Roy, DJing from behind the counter, played a bunch of Elvis and Hank Williams 78s: all titles I’d never heard before. They sounded like they were recorded last Friday.

I’d seen Roy on the street for years and always been too shy to introduce myself. But when I’m making a record, I can’t be shy. We were recording the song “Temple Beautiful” when I reached out to and told him, “I don’t think we’ve formally met. But I feel like I know you. Any chance you’d be willing to come by the studio and lend your thing to the title track?”

A couple hours later he was standing in front of me, singing and being Roy Loney. Fifteen minutes after that he’d chewed right through the tape. He was nice enough to sign my lyric sheet before he disappeared back into the fog.

Temple Beautiful was made in San Francisco by San Franciscans about San Francisco. The song itself started as a title, and that’s all it was for months. It doesn’t exactly rhyme with anything but somehow it survived. It’s set in a long-closed punk-rock club located in the old Reverend Jim Jones’s People’s Temple. I saw my first gigs there, and I still have a Temple poster with Roy Loney at the top of the bill; opening the show was Black Flag. Roy was there. He’s always been there.

Dig this Dirk Dirksen clip. (I really think Dirk says it all: “People laying it on the line in an effort to express themselves.” Yeah!) He embodied the golden era of S.F. punk. There was no dogma. No uniform. It was a freak show. Dig your inner weirdo. Wave that flag as high and as proud and high as you want.

Another photo after the jump.